I’ve yet to see any time when Nintendo has claimed a video and forced someone to take it down. Nintendo is pretty good about that, tbh. Yes, the content of the video is theirs, and technically, YouTube strickly states that you can’t post any videos of any kind unless the content is 100% entirely your own. So it’s understandable that Nintendo would put a claim on videos featuring their games, and have the right to take them down.

However, Nintendo gets too much flak for that. It IS their right to take the video down, because it is NOT content the person posting it made 100% themselves. It uses copyrighted content. Technically, all of these people who have millions of subscribers who are playing Minecraft could one day have their entire lives ruined by Mojang deciding “Yeah, that’s our copyrighted content, so we’re not gonna let you post it anymore”. Every let’s play is done with the idea that the person who made the game has the right to take the video down without needing to explain why.

And that is why Nintendo is so great! Sure, they put ads on your videos so they can earn revenue off of the thing that is THEIR content. But do you know how much revenue earns you on YouTube? Pennies… unless you’re a big name YouTuber, it’s pennies. To a company like Nintendo, that’s pretty much nothing. Their simply trying to earn money off of their games because it is their content. They aren’t hurting the fanbase. They aren’t shutting videos down (at least none I’ve seen). They’re simply going “Okay, you’re free to play our game and post videos of it, but we want part of the money from it. It is, after all, our content.” That’s not a thing they should be faulted for.

Faulting Nintendo for that would be like faulting Toby Fox for saying “Don’t make money off of Undertale.” Which… he does say that… and no one faults him for it!

Another part of it all is (at least from the things I’ve seen/read over the years) that Nintendo is quite protective of their products & image. If a video was simply that of Mario gameplay, but the audio was of somebody going on an unbelievably vulgar, racist, and all around hateful rant, screaming about “purifying the land” and other crazy shit…well, Nintendo would probably get that taken down (once they knew it existed) especially if it prominently showed that it featured their product (so, title or description mentioning Mario or Nintendo would increase the odds of Nintendo seeing & reacting to the video)

They just like to keep as much of a handle on the user created content featuring their stuff as they can (though with the advance of technology we’ve had, it’s a pretty tricky task when you don’t have the host is the content doing half the job [woo simple search/filter functions] for you)

While I get what you are saying it would be perfectly fine for a person to record themselves reading an entire book because it’s their performance(voice) that makes it unique. Kind of like how you play a game makes it unique(not just voice but in game decision, etc).

Put it this way. Put a voiceless plain 100% playthrough of Ocarina of Time on youtube and see how it does compared to it being played by all the youtube personalities and see which one draws the crowd. And yet Nintendo still insists on acting they deserve the ad money as if they are the reason people are watching it. I can honestly say that I haven’t watched a Nintendo game being played on youtube even though I love lets plays on one of my monitors at all times. I used to think that was chance but obviously people just are afraid of playing Nintendo games and having to give up their revenue.

Gonna have to disagree with you about the content being 100% with the games. Nintendo didnt record the video, didnt perform in the video and didnt edit or upload the video. the game would have been made regardless of the video and these guys playing the game will have only been better for it so nintendo shouldnt just claim videos and should always give a reason to do so. I mean its impossible to do some-most videos without adding something from the original source. If what u said was true people doing reviews of games should give all advert money to the game makers for talking about a game they made just coz they made the game